Google, BackRub, Backlinking, and the Link Hunting Obsession that Takes Its Toll

SEO News Tip of the Day!

SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little to no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links as you lay in bed trying to catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didn’t have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.

I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now, it would have been a completely different journey and a much shorter one to arrive at the place I’m at now (slightly further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And did I mention the sleepless nights.

Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article. The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).

You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of effort yields a much greater output of traffic.

The problem with this is the time it can take to see the first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters will give up because of this, while others carry on but only see little reward in the first year or so. However, there is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball and it all comes down to keyword selection.

In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so. After all what’s the point of chasing keywords that no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions? So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant. So may be there is a reason to gun for those keywords with fewer impressions?

If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results and therefore can be done much quicker. Once you’re happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not to mention more targeted.

When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with little to work left at all to get the top spot. The best thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive advantage.

Article by James Anderson, an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions, a web design and internet marketing company based Manchester, UK.

©2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.

Google is currently one of the dominant entities on the net period. The question is - is it really that omnipotent, is it really that advantageous. The question is ? IS IT REALLY "ALL THAT".

To understand role of Google in the modern net society we need to go deep into its roots. Google was born at hands of Larry Page (rich boy) and perfected by Sergey Brin (russian rich boy) at Stanford University. The idea was to rank internet pages based on number of other pages linking back. For Brin it was sort of academic approach to web page ranking where web page would model for academic paper and back links it receives would model for number of citations that academic paper accounts for. Very interesting model indeed and in a sense is very useful in the academics; bus is this model as useful in the world of internet information ranking? Does this formula objectively represent the way any given website or webpage should be ranked among other competitors? Let me be the first one to disagree.

The Google that we are all using now is a very different Google that it used to be. Thanks to brains of Brin it has evolved from simply counting backward links to an algorithm that is protected better than our troops on a foreign soil. However, the basic idea is still the same and ranking is given based on number of links your site receives from other relevant sources. So what is the problem, you might ask. Lets imagine that you have created a brand new website that centers on certain topic of interest. Lets imagine that you are an expert in that topic and you have created the best website ever on that particular topic: it covers more information than any other source on the net, it offers simplicity in navigation, it offers largest and well organized library of sources on that particular topic, it complies with w3 standards, and it even can be seen in any browser in the world including all the hand held devices. That perfect site which would be very useful to many individuals around the world would end up at the bottom of the Google ranking system unless you spend countless hours trying to get links from relevant sites, trying to pay for fraudulent looking link services, getting frustrated, and still ending up at the bottom of the Google ranking system because some of your competitors have figure out a way to create numerous doorway pages, link scams, and so on. Just because your perfect site does not account for a large number of backwards links will bring your ranking down and will bring down with it all your hard work and desire to share your expertise with others. Some day you Google up that perfect site's key word, that common sensed key word that should bring your perfect site at the top of the search results. You look at the results and you realize that there is nothing but bunch of irrelevant pages full of advertising and its all due to the fact that some geeks know how to beat the system. Now you tell me ? is that a fare way of ranking pages?

Google and its strategy brought plenty of hardship to ordinary website owners. Instead of updating and perfecting their sites owners have to hunt for links using all available means. Most of the time site owners are getting trapped into services that are questionable in nature. This environment creates numerous pitfalls for web surfers as well. Web surfers become victims of doorway pages with meaningless and countless key word links, smart redirect pages that throw you to places full of ads, and bad websites that managed to get gazillions links using their questionable techniques. All that commotion creates nothing but bad experience for anyone who is in search of information on the internet. Is that how the search engine should work, is that how omnipotent search engine should work, is that how billions making search engine should work?